Attempts to modernise the ageing fleet nearly sink it instead

ALONG Washington state's rocky coastline and inland waters, the red-and-white patrol boats and helicopters of the United States Coast Guard are a familiar sight. More than a dozen coastguard ships and aircraft and nearly 6,000 personnel work there, rescuing stricken boaters, helping with seaport security, enforcing maritime laws and so on. The job can be dangerous: in late March a coastguard petty officer fell overboard and died, and last summer two divers serving on a Seattle-based coastguard icebreaker drowned while training near the Arctic Circle.

Although it is busy and obvious and well known, the coastguard has long been a poor sibling to the navy, army and air force. At the same time, its responsibilities have grown. In 2003 it became part of the Department of Homeland Security, with increased emphasis on protecting America's 361 ports and 95,000 miles (153,000km) of coastline from terrorists.

Yet the 40,000-member service has to scratch desperately for money from Congress. Its boats are often in poor shape; some patrol cutters are over 50 years old. In 2005 USA Today ran a story on life aboard a 210-foot (64-metre) cutter, where equipment regularly malfunctioned and raw sewage flooded the sleeping quarters.

In an attempt to remedy all this, and to win back prestige, the coastguard launched “Deepwater” in the 1990s. This was a $24 billion upgrade of its ships and aircraft. The goal was a modernised fleet and air arm with complementary communications and tracking equipment, lower maintenance and better conditions for the crew. Contracts to start building were signed in 2002.

Five years on, Deepwater is plagued by catastrophe. A plan to enlarge the coastguard's 110-foot cutters into more capable 123-foot boats was scrapped last autumn after the first eight refitted boats showed signs of cracking apart. The flagships of Deepwater—eight state-of-the-art 418-foot National Security Cutters, the first of which is nearing completion—have structural flaws that will probably shorten their projected 30-year service life and lead to costly repairs.

Then, in the middle of last month, the coastguard cancelled a $600m contract to build the first 12 of 58 fast cutters. The vessels were going to be so heavy that one critic suggested they would be more like bricks than boats. These miseries have added millions of dollars to the Deepwater budget—and hampered the coastguard's ability to do its work.

What went wrong? Two things, says Steve Ellis, a graduate of the US Coast Guard Academy and vice-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group based in Washington, DC. The first mistake was the decision by the coastguard's admirals to think big: they wanted to attract the attention of contractors and, more important, Congress.

Rather than incrementally improving its ships and planes, the service tried to create what coastguard leaders called a “system-of-systems”. The idea was to build scores of new cutters, small boats, manned and unmanned aircraft, all with complementary electronics and design features that worked in unison. At one fell swoop, thought the high-ups, all their troubles would be solved.

But Deepwater was an unwieldy concept built round an unwieldy buzzword. And no one in the coastguard had the vaguest idea how to manage it, says Mr Ellis. So—its second mistake—the service had to rely on outside contractors, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, to run almost the whole programme as a joint venture. According to Kevin Jarvis, a retired coastguard captain who worked on Deepwater and testified before a Senate committee in February, these “world class” contractors kept coastguard leaders in the dark about many of the problems. Meanwhile, design and performance goals became moving targets that the contractors regularly changed.

The coastguard is now trying to correct its mistakes, but most of these are not easily undone. It is borrowing ships from the navy to cover for the remodelled 123-foot patrol boats that don't float. It intends to use its own bidding process to find replacements for the failed fast-cutter design. Procurement procedures have been sharpened. Most dramatically, on April 17th the coastguard announced that it is wresting control of Deepwater from the contractors, while the contract itself is being investigated by the Justice Department. But the hope of a unified set of equipment seems to have gone. And the flaws in some of the service's most important vessels, such as the National Security Cutter, will take years to correct.

At least Deepwater achieved one goal: the coastguard is now receiving plenty of attention. The Government Accountability Office, the federal government's budgetary supervisor, has released scathing reports. In the Senate, Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state, is holding hearings where the coastguard's admirals have been flame-broiled. She is also pushing a bill that would overhaul Deepwater's management. Mr Ellis remarks that the coastguard has long been the Boy Scout of America's armed services. It is now more like its drunken sailor.